Phoenix Rising

by Nance, John J. ;

“I know. But hold off any more start attempts. If we can get it running just once more, I want to be ready to fire off an engine.”

  Working by failing flashlight, he pushed the box back into place, carefully checking the connections—and then stopped. They might have only one chance to start. As long as the APU was down, the satellite phone was dead and there would be no way to check the theory with Seattle. But if they could restart the APU and keep it running for just a few minutes with the box out, they might get an engine started even without readings for oil pressure and engine speed.

  It would be a gamble.

  “Tyson, why don’t I stay here? You try to fire off the APU again. If you get it going, immediately try to start engine number two. If she doesn’t start in forty-five seconds, I’ll yank this box out of here. You’ll keep your finger on the switch in the meantime. That should give us the best of both possibilities.”

  The tiny beam of the pocket flashlight was dying. Brian would be in utter blackness in a few seconds. He positioned his hand on the end of the box and waited as Tyson answered.

  “Let’s try it.”

  On the third attempt, the APU caught. Both pilots held their breaths as Tyson began the start sequence, talking Brian through every step.

  “Okay, I’m showing 15 percent N-2. Moving the start switch. Nothing … nothing. Nothing, Brian.”

  “Hold on to it. Don’t worry about starter limits.”

  “I’ve got nothing, Brian.” Tyson’s voice was rising in volume and tone as Brian watched the digits of his watch and waited for forty-five seconds to elapse.

  “Brian, this isn’t cutting it!”

  “The engine’s cold-soaked, Tyson. The fuel may be frozen. Boost pumps on?”

  “Yeah! They’re on. Nothing! We’ve got nothing!”

  Brian yanked the box back toward him, feeling the electronic connectors separate from those on the end of the electronics rack. Almost immediately, Tyson was back in his ear.

  “All my engine instruments dropped to zero!”

  “Don’t stop the start!” Brian yelled, angry with himself that he hadn’t warned Tyson what he was doing.

  “You pull the box down there?”

  “Yeah. I should’ve told you. Keep going!”

  From the right side of the aircraft—or perhaps through the skin—Brian heard another noise now, the sound of vibrations starting up a long scale, from a very low frequency and climbing, accompanied by the sound of …

  “We got it! Brian, it’s starting! Number two … we’ve got it!”

  The controlled fall from the electronics bay to the ice, the struggle to reposition the metal box and close the hatch, the trip back to the rear door, and even the painful hand-over-hand climb up the inflated emergency slide, all seemed minor inconveniences now that the comfortable whine of number-two engine running played with the sweetness of a concerto in Brian’s ears.

  When he had returned to the cockpit, they decided to start number one as well. It took over a minute to start, but it ran. Brian explained the victory to the passengers, then reinitialized the satellite phone and reported the good news to Seattle, getting Bill Conrad on the other end.

  “So it was a monkeyed-with card in the box?” Conrad asked.

  “Looks like it to me, Bill. I’m no avionics expert, but this is an amateurish job.” Brian turned the circuit card over in his hand, holding it with a handkerchief. “Whoever put this in didn’t care what it looked like, which tells me he didn’t expect there to be anything left of us but wreckage.”

  Conrad was silent for a few seconds. “Maybe, but I’m not convinced that whoever did this intended to kill the engines. You said the first effect was to scramble your display screen, right?”

  “Correct.”

  “Could be he screwed up the wiring, and maybe even the timing. But you’re undoubtedly right on one point.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Whatever he was trying to do to our aircraft, it was supposed to happen within days, so that no routine maintenance check of that box would find his modified card. Otherwise he would have taken care to make it look right—y’know, like every other circuit card in the box.”

  “I suppose,” Brian said.

  Conrad told Brian of the confirmation that Clipper Ten’s engine had been bombed, and of the FBI’s response.

  “The FBI is fully with us now, Brian, and we’re having to check every component, compartment, and corner of every aircraft on every departure. Now we’re going to have to check all the rack-mounted electronics as well. This keeps up very long, the delays alone will put us out of business.”

  Brian was still cold, and still bundled in the parka, but he sat up suddenly in the captain’s seat. “Bill, get with the FBI agent and find out if he’s finished running the fingerprint checks on my files. There’s got to be a tie-in between whoever screwed around with our pilot files and what’s happening to our airplanes.” Brian laid out the details of his midnight search of the files. Bill Conrad promised to get on it immediately.

  “Brian, how’s your fuel holding out?” Bill asked.

  “Thirty-two thousand pounds. At present rate of consumption, with two engines running, we’d run out in fifteen hours, but we’re going to shut one down and alternate engines to keep them from cold-soaking. That’ll give us thirty hours.”

  Brian ended the call with Bill Conrad’s question ringing in his ears. He snapped on the landing lights and stared into the void ahead. The 767 was now pointing toward the middle of the frozen lake, its far shoreline virtually invisible in the darkness.

  “Tyson,” he said at last, his eyes flaring with surprise at the obvious conclusion.

  “Yeah?”

  “We’ve been going at this with tunnel vision.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That wind’s pretty steady, isn’t it?”

  Tyson nodded. “Yeah, I’ve been reading thirty to forty knots of airspeed with us just sitting here.”

  “Okay, and it’s possible that this lake is two or three miles long, right in the direction from which this wind is blowing, okay so far?”

  “What are you getting at, Brian?”

  “What are we sitting in, Tyson?”

  The copilot gave him a worried look, as if suddenly concerned that Captain Murphy was losing it. Just as suddenly, a small gleam of understanding flashed in Tyson’s eyes, a gleam that worked its way into a broad grin.

  “An airplane with both engines running, and enough fuel to—”

  “To get to Gander, or Goose Bay, or Thule, or maybe even Montreal!” Brian finished the sentence.

  Tyson was engaged now, but a cloud obscured the sudden smile. “But we can’t just accelerate into the night. We’ve got to know what’s out there.”

  “So we taxi out and look. This lake’s frozen solid. We taxi ahead and calculate the distance and direction and confines of the lake with our inertial nav readout, and make sure we’ve got enough room. Then we taxi back to this starting point and get the flock out of here!”

  “That would solve the other problem.”

  “What problem?”

  “Did you consider the effect of thirty hours of jet exhaust on an icy lake surface? We could sink.”

  Brian looked startled. The thought hadn’t crossed his mind. Now the idea that the main landing gear could be mired in melting and refreezing water, locking them in for good, seemed to scream for action.

  “Tyson, call the aft galley. Get Linda back there to jettison the emergency slide and lock the door. Let’s start some checklists, secure the cabin, tell the folks, and get moving!” Tyson reached for the interphone as Brian adjusted his seat forward and ran through routine control checks, feeling for the first time in two days that he was in control again.

  20

  Wednesday, March 15, 11:00 P.M. EST

  Clipper Forty

  The satellite phone call from Elizabeth came through as Brian taxied Clipper Forty back to the northeast end of the lake. The lead
flight attendant had balked at disturbing the captain, but Elizabeth pulled rank—her sleeplessness and apprehension overruling other cautions.

  “Brian! I’ve been trying for hours to reach you. What’s happening? How are you holding out?” She envisioned him still sitting in a landlocked cockpit.

  “We’re not holding out. We’re getting out!” Brian filled her in on what they were preparing to do.

  Elizabeth’s head was swimming with a combination of elation and alarm. What did a blind takeoff from an Arctic lake in darkness involve? How dangerous was it?

  She spoke her worries aloud.

  “Not as dangerous,” Brian explained, “as waiting to run out of fuel. We can’t stay here, honey. We’re out of options.”

  A severe gust of wind shoved Clipper Forty sideways a few inches as Brian called Kelly and Virginia to the cockpit, letting them speak with Elizabeth for a few minutes while he and Tyson ran through the checklists and tried to make sure nothing had been forgotten.

  The lake, which was at least four miles long, seemed to trend from the northeast to the southwest, perhaps a half-mile wide, with the entire surface frozen solid and relatively smooth. With the ferocious headwind, the 767 would probably need less than a mile of runway, and they had far more than they would need for an aborted takeoff. The so-called airfield, as Brian had explained by phone to Seattle operations, was adequate.

  They had taxied around and explored for thirty minutes before Brian brought them back to the same northeast corner where they had sat helpless for so many hours. As they approached, the landing lights illuminated the same embankment and the ruffled area of tundra where the bottom of the aft fuselage had bumped and wiggled against the surface with every major wind gust.

  Brian pointed to the spot before pivoting the 767 back toward the southwest.

  “See that depression, Tyson?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s my polar bear. I forgot to tell you when I came back in. The aft baggage compartment door was hitting the dirt and wiggling the microswitch.”

  Tyson chuckled. “Ah, so that was it. I figured you hadn’t run into any bears out there, since you came back in one piece.”

  Brian turned the 767 into the wind and set the parking brake. The airspeed indicator on his display screen was showing a steady thirty-five knots, with gusts to forty-five. The only thing they were missing was the center display, and all the engine instruments.

  Kelly handed the phone back to Brian, hugging his neck from the jumpseat behind.

  “Elizabeth? You still there?” he asked.

  “Yes. And scared to death!”

  “Don’t be. We’re in good shape, and this takeoff’ll be a piece of cake.” Another howling gust thundered around the aircraft, stopping Brian for a second as he read forty-eight knots on the airspeed indicator. The storm was getting worse without question, and his anxiety to get moving was growing with each shudder.

  “Sorry. A small distraction. I’ve got to get Kelly and your mother back to the cabin and strapped down now, so I’d better go. I’ll call you back as soon as we’re airborne.”

  He turned around and motioned to Kelly, who leaned forward and gave him a hug before retreating to the cabin with her grandmother.

  “Ready?” Brian studied Tyson’s face.

  “Ready,” the copilot confirmed.

  “Okay. Since we have zero engine indicators, we’ll have to guess at everything. I’ll push up the throttles to where the engines sound about right, hold the brakes until we start sliding, then I’ll try to keep her steady on two-zero-zero degrees true heading down the lake until you call ‘rotate.’ You added ten knots to the rotate speed?”

  “Yeah. It’s a hundred thirty-eight knots.”

  “Okay. If we lose power in either engine for any reason prior to your calling rotate, I’ll pull off the remaining power and we’ll abort. If we’re anywhere close to rotate, I’ll make the decision then and there, but as long as we’re not on fire, and since we know we’ve got enough runway, I’d say let’s get out of here.”

  “Amen,” Tyson said.

  Brian’s right hand began advancing the throttles, the engine speed following, the whine of the two high-bypass turbofans becoming a loud roar as the 767 began to buck against the restraint of the brakes, and then to skid forward, the nose pivoting to the right suddenly in the teeth of another gust.

  Brian released the brakes and used the nose-wheel tiller to straighten them out quickly, his left hand on the tiller, his right hand on the throttles as Tyson kept both his hands on the control yoke, holding it almost full forward to keep the nose wheel firmly on the surface of the frozen lake.

  The airspeed leaped within seconds to eighty knots, then ninety, then a hundred. The frozen surface had seemed perfectly smooth while they were taxiing around at low speed, but now it became a washboard, bucking, bouncing, and vibrating the instruments as well as the occupants of the cockpit and cabin as Tyson called out 110, then 120 knots.

  There was nothing in front of the windscreen now but swirling snow and ice fog streaming past. No more than three hundred feet of lake surface ahead could be seen. The landing lights stabbed into an indeterminate wall of frozen particles and disappeared impotently, but Brian kept his eyes down and on the HSI, the horizontal situation indicator, a compass projected in color on the screen in front of him. With his feet working the rudders left and right, he struggled to keep them rolling on the 200-degree heading as seconds ticked by in slow motion.

  They were accelerating blindly into a storm on the ground at over 120 miles per hour, with no hope of avoiding anything that might loom out of the ice fog ahead, and he longed to hear Tyson say the magic word.

  “ROTATE!” Tyson’s voice finally filled the cockpit. Brian responded instantly and gratefully, pulling the yoke and feeling the nose of the 767 rise smartly as the wings increased their angle of attack on the 140-knot wind stream, finally producing more lift than the aircraft had weight.

  The big Boeing bounded free of the surface then, the welcome sound of the main gear struts clunking into full extension reaching Brian’s ears as his eyes confirmed a positive rate of climb on the instruments. He pulled them smartly to fifteen degrees nose up, and at five hundred feet above the surface ordered gear up.

  “Roger, gear up,” Tyson responded, his hand snapping the gear lever to the retract position.

  As they climbed through six thousand feet, Brian reached down and retrieved the PA microphone.

  “Okay, folks, we’re safely airborne and headed back to civilization. I’ll talk with you more in a few minutes, as soon as we get to cruise altitude.”

  Cheering and applause broke out throughout the cabin, the happy sound filtering up through the cockpit door.

  As soon as Brian had called Seattle he dialed Elizabeth.

  Some three thousand miles away, sitting on the edge of her bed in London, Elizabeth Sterling let her breath out as the phone rang. Her voice cracked and failed her on the first attempt to speak.

  “Elizabeth?”

  “Yes … I … um … I’m here, darling.”

  Thank you, God! Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you! Elizabeth ran the words like a mantra in her mind as Brian’s voice filled her ear again.

  “We’re going to Goose Bay, Labrador, and I’ll call you again from there. We’re all fine, Elizabeth. It’s going to be okay now.”

  Thursday, March 16, 9:00 A.M.

  Pan Am Headquarters, Seattle

  Chad Jennings stood in the door of Pan Am’s boardroom. One by one he shook the hands of the departing board members, each of them grim-faced and shocked at the necessity of appointing an acting president while Ron Lamb struggled against partial paralysis in a nearby hospital. Jennings kept a tight rein on his facial expression, cloaking the excitement he felt at his new position.

  Joseph Taylor, Pan Am’s rotund chairman, was last out the door, grasping Chad’s hand in his meaty grip.

  “Okay, you’ve got the ball. Ke
ep me informed, daily if possible. And if Ron can regain speech, you keep him in the loop. He’s still the titular head of this thing.”

  “I will, Joe. Don’t worry.”

  “Damn shame. I’ve known Ron a long time. Margaret and I will be praying for him.”

  Chad Jennings nodded with great solemnity.

  “Another thing,” Taylor added. “Ron thinks very highly of Elizabeth Sterling. I’ll admit she did a hell of a good job on setting us up, but so far all she’s done here for us is to go chasing around New York looking for money. But we’re running out of time. Now I think …” Taylor noticed Fred Kinnen, the staff vice-president of finance and Elizabeth’s assistant, standing close by, trying to look disinterested. He was straining to hear the words that followed his new boss’s name. Taylor could see the young man leaning in their direction.

  “C’mere a minute,” Taylor said quietly to Jennings as he put his arm around the operations vice-president and walked him toward Ron Lamb’s office. They stepped inside and Taylor closed the door behind them.

  “Okay, here’s the deal, Chad. Elizabeth Sterling’s a smart financier, but she’s still a broad, and I don’t think she’s gonna cut the mustard in forcing good ol’ boys to loan us money, especially with Wall Street convinced we’re in trouble. Women’s lib aside, there are men out there who simply won’t trust a female in corporate finance, and who won’t trust us ’cause we’ve got a female representing us in a crisis.”

  “What’s the point, Joe?” Jennings asked.

  “Point is, that’s your most important assignment. You start looking for a loan, too. Right now. We need eighty-five million by Friday, or we’re all out of a job! Call our local bankers or whatever, but do it.”

  “And if they ask me why our finance chief isn’t the one calling?”

  “Hell, say you’re calling for her. You’re the acting president. You’re her boss in that position.”

  “Joe, what if we sold a plane? One that’s not mortgaged, I mean.”

  Taylor scowled, wondering if they’d made a mistake in trusting Jennings.

  “Chad, get with that scarecrow Kinnen over there and learn the ropes—fast. We don’t own any airplanes anymore. They were all sold and leased back. You’d forgotten that?”